Free Palestine.
I begin this month’s newsletter with those two words not as a provocation nor as a polemic. Rather, I write them out as a reminder to myself, a desperate attempt to free myself from this realm in which I am trapped.
Still, my efforts may be in vain. Worse, they may prove counterproductive in the ongoing fight for freedom in Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan and beyond. Can newsletters affect change? Can any piece of pop culture affect change?
It is a question I have asked in various forms over the years, always arriving at the same conclusion. Just take this paragraph all the way back from Cory’s Reads #3:
Here we are, telling and interpreting stories that seemingly get at the heart of some of the most existential issues of our time, while the world around us chugs along per usual. It’s an unsettling dynamic, one that threatens my very existence. I’ve dedicated myself to unpacking pop culture artifacts and assigning them various meanings, potentials, and responsibilities. Yet there remains a lingering sense that culture has become a world unto itself. Pop culture has siloed itself off from the rest of the world, ensuring a disconnect between the ideas promoted in movies like Arrival, and the ideas carried out in a real-world crisis.
Every once in a while, this cozy bubble in which we find ourselves needs to burst, only to regain its shape once more. So…free Palestine. We are here to talk about movies, and we will, but as we shout from our echo chambers, it is fair to wonder who can hear us.
OK…that’s enough mixed metaphor for one newsletter. This month’s issue is about pop culture’ s power to dig its claws into our politics and never let go, ensnaring agents of change in something as superfluous as Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I spoke last month about both The Zone of Interest and Killers of the Flower Moon, two politically charged 2023 releases that preoccupied themselves with their own inability to carry out their respective missions. Afraid that film may no longer be able to account for the complexities of modern storytelling, Jonathan Glazer and Martin Scorsese tackled the conundrum head-on. Both directors are concerned that their films — simply by being films — could force their subjects out of the very conversations in which they are hoping to be invited. Each director’s counter-efforts are admirable, but like mine, they may be in vain.
To his credit, Glazer further attempted to free The Zone of Interest from its pop culture prison when he accepted his Oscar for Best International Film at the Academy Awards earlier this year. We have all seen the speech by now: Glazer valiantly contextualized his film amidst the ongoing Israeli-Palestine conflict, rejecting the superficial exploitation of his Jewish faith in service of Zionism. His stuttered breaths and hurried voice patterns only underscored how dangerous it was for him to say those words in a room filled with Hollywood’s most rich and powerful.
The speech was met with cheers inside the room, but was quickly decried by those outside. More than 1,000 Jewish creatives banded together to release a statement denouncing Glazer’s explanation of his own film. Pettily rewording Glazer’s own speech, the open letter read: “We refute our Jewishness being hijacked for the purpose of drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination.”
Glazer delivered his speech on March 10th. The response came on March 18th. At the time, the saga seemed like a testament to the power of Glazer’s monologue and the ignorance of a privileged few. But when a group of well-meaning celebrities joined forces on April 10th — a full month removed from Glazer’s controversial acceptance speech — to denounce the denouncement and show support for Glazer’s words, a much sadder and more pathetic truth emerged…
None of this shit matters.
None of it! Glazer made a powerful film that meant a lot to him (and hopefully others.) He then gave a powerful speech that meant a lot to him (and hopefully others.) But in doing so, he ensured the impact of those words could only be felt in the far, far away realm of popular culture. And when Hollywood elites (and not-so-elites) took up arms on both sides of this new culture war, it became clear how distant our discourse had strayed from the incredibly real war going on in the Middle East. The focus of our discourse is not the violence in Gaza, but rather more discourse.
It’s not Glazer’s fault that the content of his speech ultimately fell on deaf ears, although he was likely not surprised by our collective inability to engage. In some ways, it is not even the fault of those several thousand signees on both side’s of the Oscar speech debate. The allure of a culture war is undeniable; the talking points are easier to grasp, the stakes easier to swallow. Participation becomes a form of play rather than an obligation to be carefully navigated.
Glazer is not alone in his futile refusal to play the game of pop culture. His fellow countryman Alex Garland all but promised provocation with his latest film Civil War, which imagines a dystopian United States where a fascist president has risen to power, and faces opposition from the combined forces of Texas and California. The premise has obvious echoes of Americas both past and present, so it’s all the more surprising that Garland largely avoids Civil War’s eerie implications.
Garland centers his story around a ragtag team of journalists, headlined by a pair of war photographers in Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). He follows Lee and Jessie, along with Joel (Wagner Moura) and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), on a roundabout road trip from New York to D.C. Their war-torn surroundings complicate their route, taking them westward through Pennsylvania and back through West Virginia. As that setup might suggest, Civil War operates like an indie road trip film. Its moments of conflict are few and far between, and its fiction is rather flimsy. Aside from the far-fetched alliance between Texas and California, Garland intentionally obscures the details of this American civil war that he has imagined so as to maintain focus on his central group of reporters. The son of a journalist, Garland is less interested in the politics of his dystopia and more so in the bravery of journalism during wartime. It’s a rather simple insight for a film so bold in its origin.
And ultimately, it feels misguided.
Civil War was already a film with enormous weight on its shoulders. Its provocative premise was always going to make it divisive amongst viewers, and its $50 million budget makes it A24’s most expensive film to date. Of course, only Garland knew that he was not making the film viewers expected, nor the one A24 sold with its action-packed marketing. Civil War is more personal than that, and arguably less interesting as a result.
Garland has been adamant that Civil War is an anti-war movie, and the formal elements of the film would certainly support that idea. As Lee and Jessie snap photos on the battlegrounds of war-torn America, we are momentarily treated to the fruits of their labor. Freeze-frames interrupt Civil War’s high-octane sequences in order to share with us the few images that will eventually account for the entirety of this saga. Some of these pictures are gorgeous and moving; others are unfocused and nondescript. They may live on as vital primary resources, but they could never account for the sheer terror of the events they are meant to capture. Civil War is an anti-war film insofar as Garland renders all that onscreen violence in the most bleak and upsetting of terms. His use of sound in the film is particularly effective. Gunshots and explosions are loud, but the film will just as soon go silent or compliment those booms and bangs with a 20th century pop song.
But can you make an anti-war film about a war that has not happened?
Put another way — can you make an anti-war film about that has not happened yet?
By imagining a very possible future for a country constantly hurtling towards chaos, Garland has entered into a kind of contractual agreement. He is obligated — whether he knows it or not — to fully realize that terrifying hypothetical. It is not enough for Civil War to be political — it is — but rather it must flesh out its promised vision of dystopia. Whether he was uninterested or unprepared, Garland ultimately failed to reckon with the possible outcomes of his premise.
Civil War is not without perspective, of course. Beyond its evangelization of journalists, the film adopts a blandly centrist angle on the American political divide. The aforementioned alliance between California and Texas makes it so that viewers are unable to map their own understanding of U.S. politics onto the film. Even as vaguely alt-right elements emerge to the surface at times — Jesse Plemons’ rogue soldier is the only clear referent for reality in his lone chilling scene — the film never makes it clear what combatants are fighting for, or what it is they believe in. There is a secessionist movement and an authoritarian government, but even these are entirely devoid of context.
I must admit that I have some lingering respect for Garland and his decision to deprive viewers of the discourse his film had promised. The reactions to Civil War’s sidestepping plot are surely rooted in our shared desire to dig around in the sandbox of pop culture, safely situated under the watchful eye of mom (A24, I think?) and dad (Alex Garland, I guess?). There is no actual civil war, no real threat to our daily life. But we can satisfy our dramatic cravings when films like Civil War feed us inflammatory opinions, no matter if we agree or disagree.
After all, there is an uncomfortable truth bubbling beneath the surface of Civil War: war has arrived on American soil, and our violent nation can’t help but find it thrilling. A better version of the film could have truly grappled with this discomfiting notion. Garland is content to remind audiences that polarization is unfounded, able to be overcome in the face of fascism. To that I ask…has Alex Garland spent any time in the United States over the last eight years?
Garland’s vision of dystopia is oddly utopian. Opposing forces come together in recognition of a greater evil. It is the strongest piece of evidence that Civil War is a fictional film, further removed from reality than we ever could have imagined. We know from our experiences with Glazer’s speech earlier this year that a heavily politicized version of Civil War would remain ineffectual and compartmentalized, but it is difficult to deny the cowardice of the version we got instead.
Of course, such cowardice runs rampant through Hollywood, making Garland and A24’s promise of a genuinely confrontational film all the more disappointing. Dev Patel’s directorial debut Monkey Man arrived just a week before Civil War. You can read my full thoughts on the film below, but it is worth noting that its unlikely arrival on the big screen is a miracle unto itself.
This version of Monkey Man may feel rather neutered and uneven, but that makes a lot more sense once you realize the film began as a Netflix Original, before the streaming giant abandoned the project out of fear that Indian audiences — a sizable portion of Netflix’s global audience — would respond negatively to the politics of the film. Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions stepped in to save the movie, and cobble together its disparate parts. Some admirably transgressive choices remain intact — the transgender hijra representation feels especially significant — but Monkey Man otherwise feels disconnected from Narendra Modi and his hostile brand of Hindu nationalism.
In rescuing the action flick from purgatory, Peele oversaw one of its most notable alterations, turning the film’s saffron-colored banners red. Saffron is synonymous with religious nationalism in India, whereas red seems to be a universal indicator of evil (its association with communism likely not an accident.) The political subtext in Monkey Man never moves beyond these background color schemes, but the change still demonstrates a watering-down of Monkey Man and its political commentary. Even with this attempt to make the film more palatable, a theatrical release in India is still unlikely.
All such decisions are reflective of film’s status as a political entity. Movies must have real-world implications; why else would major corporations balk at the politics of so many? Of course, those implications are strictly economic. Audiences may be less likely to consume film and television that does not align with their politics — they may even view those decisions to boycott or avoid a given film as a form of protest — but these are cultural decisions, their impact limited to this distant realm.
So should movies play the game of politics? Or keep running laps on this playground we call pop culture? If the best outcome we can hope for is discourse begetting more discourse…are movies still worth our time?
My answer is yes, although not a resounding one. It’s hushed, my voice shaky and unsure. The Zone of Interest was a sharply observed movie, its politics reaching far into the past in order to bring those horrors into the present. By quite literally offering documentary footage of a cleaning crew in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, Glazer confronts us with this connection across time, refusing to let us off the hook. Documentary and nonfiction offer their own interesting relationship with that dichotomy between pop culture and politics. Their basis in reality leaves less room for that cognitive dissonance to which we have all fallen guilty. I recently rewatched Lauren Poitras’ brilliant Citizenfour, the best spy thriller of the last decade. By tracing Edward Snowden’s story in real-time, Citizenfour is a greater testament to the power of journalism and the dangers of fascism than Civil War could dream to be.
Measuring the impact of a film like Citizenfour is nearly impossible, its legacy inextricable from that of its subject. Our understanding of Snowden is tied up in every media portrayal of him over the last decade. Citizenfour is just one slice of that pie. Still, by confronting us with Snowden’s reality — particularly his outlook and demeanor in the leadup to the public reveal of his identity — the film refuses to let us off the hook. Glazer’s ending to The Zone of Interest has a similar effect, and Spike Lee has employed a similar strategy across several of his films, including BlacKKKlansman and Do the Right Thing. These archival interjections all feel like admissions that film (and fiction in particular) is an inadequate artform for our times. But we live in an era defined by our powerlessness, and our time in the pop culture playground may grant us the agency we so desperately seek.
And so, with the awareness that every edition of this newsletter is an insignificant rambling from a culture-obsessed madman, I repeat…free Palestine.
As promised, April’s Review of the Month is about Dev Patel’s Monkey Man. See you all in May.
-Cory Reid
It's a shame that Monkey Man has been branded as a John Wick knockoff before it's even had a chance to stake out its own territory in the action genre. In his directorial debut, Dev Patel carves out an entirely unique action aesthetic, trading in the fluid gun-fu of the Wick series for the stuttering and dizzying effect of comics books. Indeed, Monkey Man may be one of the better approximations of the comic form onscreen, although Patel's inexperience becomes obvious as even the film's most immersive action sequences wear their herky-jerky construction on their sleeves. The cuts here are reckless, and even the "hidden" ones can't help but make their presence felt. Monkey Man is not John Wick, but it's not quite slick or seamless enough to be the grimy action odyssey it so desperately wants to be.
But maybe Patel and company don't actually mind the John Wick comparisons. The film invites them after all, name-dropping Wick within its first twenty minutes, and introducing an ultimately irrelevant canine character as a kind of tease for its audience. But if Patel was truly content to riff on Wick in this new South Asian context (its supporting cast of Indian stars and energetic collection of Indian tunes are all undeniable standouts), he may have been wise to adopt that franchise's unwavering commitment to adrenaline. Monkey Man commits the grave action movie sin of actually trying to tell a story, becoming shockingly boring for long stretches. When this film is at its bloodiest and punchiest, it's a lot of fun, no matter how choppy those bouts of violence and brutality may ultimately be. But too much of Monkey Man is spent rehashing the same flashbacks or the same "reveals" and the result is disappointing at best, exhausting at worst.
As with many debuts for actors-turned-directors, Monkey Man has likely earned Dev Patel a second chance. This first directorial attempt has its thrills, but no action thriller should make me this sleepy.
More monkeys wouldn't have hurt either. I'm always down for more monkeys. A whole planet of them, perhaps.
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